Italscania Truck Configurator

The Swedish company, Scania, was incorporated in 1911 and currently is the only large producer focused exclusively on utility vehicles with the total weight exceeding 18t and buses. Presently, Scania produces more than 50,000 vehicles per year. Approximately 97% of the total production is supplied to markets outside Sweden. About 2/3 of them are applied in European Union countries, 1/5 in Latin America, and the remaining part in countries of Central and Eastern Europe and in Asia.

Italscania is a daughter company of Scania and its activities consist of import, support of dealers, and provision of service. Italscania annually sells more than 3,000 trucks. The company’s turnover reaches Euro 300 million per annum.

Support of Sellers

The success and excellent business results of Italscania directly depend on the quality of a network of its sellers. In Italscania, they are aware of such fact, therefore they try to simplify work of their sellers or make it as effective as possible. This is why they have decided to invest in a tool, which will help them to serve more customers, and finally implement substantially more orders.

What is Truck Configurator?

Truck Configurator is an extremely effective tool for the support of sale. It relieves sellers of a laborious manipulation with a price list and allows them to promptly create (configure) a cargo truck at a given moment precisely according to customer’s requirements This means that the customer “puts together” its own cargo truck with a seller in real time. It starts by a selection of a specific model, enters a type of the engine, chassis, size of wheels, type and accessories of the cab, etc..

The application allows an immediate printing of the configured set in the form of an offer, together with other documents necessary for an implementation of the order. It is possible to store and repeatedly retrieve any orders created, create leasing calculations and budgets of the service support. When compared to version 1.0, which was completed by Lomtec already in 2003, the application has also been harmonized with the ItalScanie central ordering system, and many other upgrades have been prepared.

Implementation

ITC 2.0 is a desktop JAVA application. The ActiveOffice solution has been used as the Administration Intranet. By its functionality, it follows from the first configurator version, being also from the Lomtec works, completed already in 2003. In other words, ITC 2.0 is not the first experience of Scanie in solutions of our company. Scania Italy has already used the Intranet Document Management portal running on the ActiveOffice platform developed by us for several years, serving, for instance, for the maintenance of a database of contacts of internal firm employees, dealers, services, etc.

“Works on the ITC 2.0 project were carried out from May to the beginning of July 2004”, Peter Laczko, Project Manager of Lomtec responsible for the ITC 2.0. project says. “These were followed by testing and implementation of comments of users. The distribution of the final application on CD carriers to dealers in Italy was done at the beginning of December 2004.” Each of the sellers is able to individually install the application. The same applies to updates, which have already been implemented.

Italscania is Satisfied with work of Lomtec

The solution delivered has corresponded to accurately defined requirements and Italscania has expressed its maximum satisfaction with the work of Lomtec. Already now, also version 3.0 has started to be considered, which would of course respond to responses specific experience of users in version 2.0. At the same time, the possibility to create an ITC version for the use on handheld computers (PDA) is being discussed, which would mean another quality progress in wok of ItalScanie sellers.